The plan is quickly churned out by equating a geographical region with two or three leading newspaper titles. And as these big newspaper titles guzzle the press budget, there is little left for magazines, especially 'niche magazines'.

But why should you and your client bother about Magazines? Simply because, NRS data reveals that magazine readers, and niche magazine's in particular, have the highest affluence levels! Given the drive to improve ROI of media investments, they make worthy candidates for your press plans.

Before we build a case for magazines, lets look at the macro picture. A look at the Chart 1 will show that magazines are indeed low on priority. Only about 16% of all press spends goes into magazines advertising.

Chart 1: Magazines have only 16% share of Press Budget (Rs Cr)

But how much can magazines contribute to generating sales and market share? One obvious way is to look at how many readers they have, against dailies. But are you chasing readers or are you interested in a 'market'? Guess, the second one. Therefore, to benchmark the true worth of what print titles individually and collectively can contribute; we computed the total Readership Net worth by multiplying Key Durable Ownership with the approximate MRP of durables. See details in 'Methodology' below.

The results are an eye opener. Amongst top 50 publications (newspapers and magazines) sorted by total Net Worth, magazines have 80% share! In other words, if the collective net worth of all readers (duplication included) is Rs. 100, magazine readers have a worth of Rs. 80. Only 9 dailies figure in our top 50 list. Click here for the list.

Lets look at some data used for our conclusion. Table 1 shows the traditional 15-list basis the readership. Newspapers dominate this list completely. Only 3 magazines feature in this list. But when we compute the total Readership Net worth, we see a surge in magazine titles. See Table 2. Of the 15 titles, 8 are magazines! This simple analysis shows that while Newspapers may have more readers, it is magazines that have better profile.

Table 1: Top 15 by Readership     Readership ('000') Hindi Dlys Dainik Bhaskar 11943 Hindi Dlys Dainik Jagran 11417 Hindi Mags Saras Salil 10696 Mal. Dlys Mal Manorama - D 9785 Tamil Dlys Dly Thanthi 9731 Telugu Dlys Eenadu 9067 Mal. Dlys Mtbhmi-M 7337 Marathi Dlys Lokmat 7320 Hindi Mags Grihshobha 6748 Hindi Dlys Amar Ujala 6514 Bengali Dlys A.B.P 6135 English Mags India Today - Eng 5761 Hindi Dlys Hindustan 5756 Hindi Dlys Nav Bharat 5630 Hindi Dlys Punjab Kesari 5534 Source: NRS 2001

Table 2: Top 15 by Total Net Worth*     Durable Totals (Rs 000) English Dlys Times of India 646983 English Mags India Today - E 630688.5 English Mags Readers' Digest 516986 Hindi Mags Grihshobha 484682.5 Hindi Dlys Dainik Bhaskar 448153 English Mags Filmfare 436931.5 Hindi Dlys Dainik Jagran 433080.5 English Dlys Hindustan Times 383351 Hindi Mags India Today - H 310515.5 English Mags Stardust 309137 Hindi Dlys Punjab Kesri 306782.5 Mal. Dlys Mal Manorama - D 287296 Gujarati Dlys Gujarat Samachar 250917.5 English Mags Femina 248744 English Mags CSR 245113.5 * Net Worth is calculated by cum value of key durables owned by readers 5939362 See Methodology for more details

Before we move any further, a quick primer on what we really mean by 'total Readership Net worth'. For each print title covered by NRS 01, we generated the Key Durable ownership. Key Durables were essentially 7 high-ticket items like Colour TV, Washing Machine, PC etc. We then allocated a MRP value to each durable and arrived at the 'total Readership Net worth' by addition the product of each durable ownership and MRP, for each title separately.

While these are Top 15 titles that have large readership bases, how about the niche magazines? Do they deliver significant value? Yes, They Do.

When we calculate Net worth per reader, we see some amazing outputs. All top 15 titles, accept two, are magazines and all of them are niche magazines! Special interest magazines Cosmopolitan, BS Motoring, GladRags find themselves in the top 10.
See Table 3 below.

Table 3: Top 15 by highest Net Worth per Reader
		Net Worth ('000)
English Mags	Teens Today	217.52353
English Mags	A&M	214.35185
English Mags	Cosmopolitan	205.42308
English Dlys	Financial Express	201.03333
English Mags	GladRags	189.75313
English Mags	BS Motoring	177.8494
English Mags	Auto India	176.68997
English Mags	Savvy	176.47135
English Mags	Car&Bike	175.3869
English Mags	Inside Outside	171.58424
English Mags	NewsWeek	171.25658
English Mags	FortInd	168.28788
English Dlys	Tribune	166.40225
English Mags	Intelligent Investor	161.7089
English Mags	PCQuest	159.25
Source: NRS 01

What can be the reason of this dramatic difference in newspaper and magazine readership and product ownership?

Clearly, niche magazines have a better readership profile (as measured by Key Durable ownership). Assuming that cost- per-contact of niche magazines is close to mass titles, they offer a strong rationale for inclusion in press plans. Perhaps, at the cost of a few insertions in colossal daily titles.

Methodology------------- To calculate 'total Readership Net worth' we calculated the following: Step 1: We assimilated total readership (U+R) and product ownership of each print title covered by NRS. Step 2: We allocated approximate MRP for each of the seven products (Col TV, Motor Cycle, Scooter, Cars, AC, Washing Machine and PC, and multiplied the same with product ownership of each title. We then cumulated Net worth of individual products to arrive at 'total Readership Net worth' for each title. Step 3: To calculate Net worth per reader for each title, we simply divided the 'total Readership Net worth' by total readers.